Strong potential, alas, left me disappointed
I'm conflicted on what rating to give this drama. On one hand, it made me stay up until 3am, unable to stop watching even though I had to wake up in an hour for work. It made me go into fits of giggles, laughing in public like a madwomen.
On the other hand, I had to completely skip 10 episodes to be able to continue and, at the end, it gave me such a disdain towards the Lin family and it's brothers-in-law that it made me begin to doubt all my previous feelings towards the show as a whole.
I found the plots overall to be highly entertaining and well done. I don't care much about cliché or out of pocket stories, I think complaining about that is like if I were to complain about murder being in a thriller or magic being in a fantasy movie. That's simply the genre of the show. I liked the acting and the chemistry of most couples.
However, as I mentionned the cons of the series just were so big it truly turned such a good experience into contempt. I love real characters, characters with both flaws and merits. Yet, when a show portrays a flaw as a merit, it is unacceptable to me. Throughout the show, the Lin family is known to scheme. And a lot of the time, it is for good reasons or for a good moral cause. But not all the time. And when they hurt people and cause harm with the schemes, the show still portrays the scheming in a good light, telling us they had good reasons to do so. After a couple of uncomfortable moments, the way they handled Yang Xian was the final straw. It just made the whole family extrenely unlikeable, to the point that I wasn't rooting for them. I needed at least one scheme that showed them a lesson that they can't just play with people's feelings and lives just because they are uncertain about them.
Then there are smaller negatives about the show, such as the 2nd cp that was unlikeable to me as their foundation seemed very weak to me. A proud man who denies any women for his focus on his career and who is unhappy with the marriage, going as far as openly disrespecting his wife, changes his whole character once he glances at his wife. I know they slid in a "he read her poetry so it's not only about her looks", yet he didn't actually change his attitude until his eyes laid on her. Another one, is how we don't see much of the couple's dynamic after their episodes end.
On the other hand, I had to completely skip 10 episodes to be able to continue and, at the end, it gave me such a disdain towards the Lin family and it's brothers-in-law that it made me begin to doubt all my previous feelings towards the show as a whole.
I found the plots overall to be highly entertaining and well done. I don't care much about cliché or out of pocket stories, I think complaining about that is like if I were to complain about murder being in a thriller or magic being in a fantasy movie. That's simply the genre of the show. I liked the acting and the chemistry of most couples.
However, as I mentionned the cons of the series just were so big it truly turned such a good experience into contempt. I love real characters, characters with both flaws and merits. Yet, when a show portrays a flaw as a merit, it is unacceptable to me. Throughout the show, the Lin family is known to scheme. And a lot of the time, it is for good reasons or for a good moral cause. But not all the time. And when they hurt people and cause harm with the schemes, the show still portrays the scheming in a good light, telling us they had good reasons to do so. After a couple of uncomfortable moments, the way they handled Yang Xian was the final straw. It just made the whole family extrenely unlikeable, to the point that I wasn't rooting for them. I needed at least one scheme that showed them a lesson that they can't just play with people's feelings and lives just because they are uncertain about them.
Then there are smaller negatives about the show, such as the 2nd cp that was unlikeable to me as their foundation seemed very weak to me. A proud man who denies any women for his focus on his career and who is unhappy with the marriage, going as far as openly disrespecting his wife, changes his whole character once he glances at his wife. I know they slid in a "he read her poetry so it's not only about her looks", yet he didn't actually change his attitude until his eyes laid on her. Another one, is how we don't see much of the couple's dynamic after their episodes end.
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